George Sale

Background

George Sale (1697–1736) was an English orientalist whose 1734 translation of the Qur'an — "translated into English from the original Arabic, with explanatory notes taken from the most approved commentators, to which is prefixed a Preliminary Discourse," dedicated to Lord Carteret (title page) — was the standard scholarly English Qur'an for well over a century, reprinted in 1764, 1795, 1801 "and many later editions" (bibliography in the Rodwell ed.). The Preliminary Discourse, a long orientalist survey of Arabia, Muhammad's career, and the Qur'an itself, is the first extended critical account of the Qur'an's textual history in English. source pending

Positions held in this wiki

• Qur'an Preservation vs Textual History — the early-modern in-corpus anchor. Preliminary Discourse §III narrates, from Muslim sources: Muhammad's revelations were left "in the same disorder I have mentioned," and collection "was the work of his successor, Abu Becr," who gathered them "not only from the palm-leaves and skins on which they had been written... but also from the mouths of such as had gotten them by heart," committing the transcript "to the custody of Hafsa the daughter of Omar" (Sale 1734, Prelim. Disc. §III). In the thirtieth year of the Hejra, Othmân, "observing the great disagreement in the copies of the Korân in the several provinces," had copies transcribed from Hafsa's exemplar under Zeid Ebn Thabet and three supervisors, dialect disputes resolved in favor of the Koreish, "and the old ones burnt and suppressed" — yet "some various readings still occur" (§III). Sale also documents the "seven principal editions" whose verse-counts range from 6,000 to 6,236 while agreeing on words and letters (§III).

Key works in our corpus

• The Koran, trans. George Sale, 1734, with the Preliminary Discourse — corpus quirk: the file is catalogued as quran-shakir.txt, but its Gutenberg title page reads "Translator: George Sale" (verified); it contains Sale 1734, not the Shakir translation. The mislabel is documented here and in Qur'an Preservation vs Textual History; the metadata sidecar should eventually be corrected.

Principal critics / interlocutors

• Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī — the classical insider compiler of the very traditions Sale reports; the confessional reading takes the same collection history as evidence of providential preservation rather than of an ordinary human textual process.
• Later orientalism refines Sale: John Medows Rodwell's 1861 edition and its successors supersede his apparatus, and modern manuscript scholarship has moved well beyond his commentator-based method.

See also

• John Medows Rodwell — the nineteenth-century successor account in corpus.
• Keith E. Small — the contemporary comparative (controlled vs. uncontrolled transmission) development of the critical line.
• Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī — the classical Sunni epistemology within which the preservation doctrine functions.